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We even made a blood pact on it by sticking our thumbs with safety pins and mashing them together. We spent the next twelve years attempting to make that fantasy a reality in every way our somewhat devious and definitely outrageous minds could dream up.
It was my bad luck, considering Lee’s moral code was a bit sketchy, that I fell into Liam Nightingale’s Ethical Rule Book at Rule Number Two (with Rule Number One being “Thou shalt not nail your brother’s girlfriend”). I was “Thou shalt not nail your little sister’s best friend.”
I also grew up like a member of the family, which made me practically his little sister by default. In my last effort to throw myself at him, when I was twenty and he was twenty-three, he’d told me exactly that. It was pretty fucking embarrassing, but then again, so were all of my other attempts and that never stopped me.
Still, for some reason, that last one really hurt. Lee wasn’t cruel or anything, he was just…final.
The Great Liam Chase ended right then and there, at least for me. Ally still has (very) high hopes. Not to mention Kitty Sue, who I think has always wanted me to fall for one of her sons, and it’s been pretty clear that her druthers would put me with Lee. Probably because she thinks we deserve each other.
I resigned myself to seeing Lee at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, every birthday celebration, most family parties and barbeques, and over at Hank’s when we’re watching a game and the like. Unfortunately, this means I see Lee a lot. Usually, there are always enough other people around to run interference.
If, on the odd occasion that he’s at his parents’ house for dinner (these days it’s less odd—more like Kitty Sue is getting a bit desperate and becoming far more obvious at playing matchmaker) and I’m also invited, I make my excuses (mostly lies) and leave as fast as my boots will take me. This usually pisses off Ally and Kitty Sue, buttheyhadn’t thrown themselves at the guy for over a decade and been rebuffed repeatedly, and then had to live the rest of their lives seeing that guy at dinner and on holidays. It’s mortifying, let me tell you.
Not to mention Lee went from Bad Boy to Badass in half a decade. By the end of that decade he was Badass Extraordinaire. You didn’t mess with Lee. I may have been a bit of a wild child, but I knew enough about playing with fire and getting burned, and Lee Nightingale had gone from a bonfire to a towering fucking inferno in ten years.
Don’t get me wrong, Liam Nightingale still has killer good looks, only slightly marred by a small, crescent moon scar under his left eye. He also still has a killer bod that looks great in jeans, great in sweats, great in suits, great in anything. He also still has a killer smile on the odd occasions he flashes it. And, finally, he also still likes women with lots of T&A and lots of hair (and I was still a woman just like that).
But he’s also dangerous.
I don’t know how to explain this. He just is. Trust me.
* * *
These days,I still go to rock concerts. I still listen to music way too loud. I still wear my red hair long and wild in a tangle of waves that fall in a deep V down my back. I still have some serious T&A. Let’s just say my body is my gift and my curse. A body like mine isn’t difficult to maintain—just feed it loads of crap to keep the curves, but keep in shape because you’ve got to lug it around everywhere.
These days, though, my parties have real, home-cooked hors d’oeuvres and bowls of cashews, and nobody passes out in my bed or pukes in the back yard anymore.
These days I’m also the owner of a used bookstore located on Broadway. NottheBroadway in NYC. The other Broadway, in Denver, Colorado, US of A.
My grandmother left me the store when she died. It would seem a rather staid profession, owning a bookstore. You’d think I wore tortoiseshell glasses and had my hair back in a bun. This isn’t true about my bookstore or me, by any stretch of the imagination.
You see, my grandmother was a hellion, she’d raised a hellion in my mom, Katherine, and she and Dad carefully oversaw raising the third generation hellion that was me.
My bookstore is on the southeast corner of Broadway and Bayaud. Not the greatest neighborhood, not the worst. In the times of my grandmother, the ’hood had been in decline. Now it’s on an upswing.
My inheritance came with half a duplex one block down on Bayaud in the Baker Historical District. I live in the east side of the duplex, a gay couple live in the west side, another gay couple live east of me, and another behind me. This is why Baker is safe. It’s populated mainly by gay couples, DINKS, hippies and Mexicans. When I, a single, white female who looks like (and is) a rock ’n’ roll groupie of the highest order, moved in, they all called each other and said, “There goes the neighborhood.”
My bookstore is named Fortnum’s. There was no reason for this, except Gram had gone to Fortnum and Mason’s in London the year before she opened it, and she thought it sounded highbrow.
There’s nothing highbrow about Fortnum’s.
In the day (that was Gram’s day), it was a hippie hang out and still is, in a way. Harley boys often came there, too, don’t ask me why. Now it’s also filled with preppies, yuppies and DINKS trying to be trendy, and boarders and goths because it is trendy.
It has a bunch of mismatched shelves stuffed full of all sorts of used books and tables piled high with vinyl records. It’s a rabbit warren of organized disorganization, every once in a while punctuated by a fluffy, overstuffed chair. Most people come in, find a book, read in a chair and leave without buying the book, maybe coming back the next day to pick it up again and read some more.
With the shop, I also inherited Gram’s two employees, which, shall we say diplomatically, are just as eccentric as she was.
Jane’s my romance (our biggest seller) expert. She’s six foot and weighs in at about one-twenty, painfully thin, painfully shy. She keeps her nose in a novel nearly every minute of the day, when she isn’t buying them off people hawking their books for our shelves or selling them to people with mumbled recommendations. She’s told me she’s written over forty novels herself but never had the gumption to try to get them published. She didn’t even have the courage to allow me to read them, and I ask all the time.
There’s also Duke. Duke’s a Harley man, all leather and denim with a big ole gray beard and loads of long, steel-gray hair with a bandana tied around his forehead. He talks rough, lives rough and is tough as nails, but can be soft as a marshmallow if he likes you (luckily, he likes me). He used to be an English Lit professor at Stanford before he dropped out and moved to the mountains. He’s married to Dolores, who works part-time at The Little Bear up in Evergreen, where Duke and Dolores own a tiny cabin.
Gram loved Fortnum’s. She looked at it kinda like her own personal community center. She was not an especially good businesswoman, but she was happy to make do and play hostess to her eclectic group of pals. Gramps brought in an okay salary, and when he died, left her with a decent pension so she didn’t have much to worry about.
Fortnum’s smells musty and old, and just like Gram, I love every inch of it.
When I wasn’t at the police station, with the Nightingales or out with Ally, I was at Fortnum’s with Gram, Duke, and then came Jane. It was always one of my homes away from home, and those come with being a motherless child, believe you me.
But the way I’d inherited it, it sure as hell wasn’t going to keep me in my cowboy boots, Levi’s, and huge, silver belt buckles attached to tooled-leather belts, my signature outerwear. My signature underwear was strictly sexy-girlie lace and silk. Gram said that looking like a cowboy-inspired groupie on the outside was one thing, but every girl had to have a secret, and sexy underwear was the best secret a girl could have.
